“I should like to bury something precious every place where I’ve been happy, so that when I’m old and ugly and miserable, I can come back and dig it up." /// "I left her praying in the chapel... I never came back to disturb her prayers"

A superb adaptation that avoids any 'heritage' pitfalls and instead provides a very faithful and languidly melancholic saunter through another of Waugh's 'decline and fall' stories of the English aristocracy on its uppers. It's almost faultless in most respects and - cliche though it is - a high peak in the possibilities of British television.

The perfect adaptation. Anthony Andrews and Jeremy Irons are perfect for their roles, in fact, all characters are brilliantly casted. The aesthetic of the film suits the characters and storyline wonderfully, and so does the soundtrack. Follows the novel exactly, and the script mostly follows the novel's dialogue and first person narrative. God I love this.

Literary/theatrical television masterclass, truly engaging, despite the horrendous & realistically depressing & suffocating catholic-bourgeoisie ending (which, of course, is Waugh's original touch, not the series' fault per se). The ending is a good meter to gauge whether one has found his/her place in society and understands it, or whether one hates it.

A magical, utterly immersive experience for any hopelessly bookish misfit of the anti-X generation. And it has aged quite well I find (particularly given the 2008 banality starring the otherwise talented M. Goode). Charles Ryder is in a sense the perfect anti-hero and Irons inhabits him completely with subtlety and candour. Nostalgic overindulgence: yes, but never mindless.